lists of 5 pt. 2
collection of the most impactful things I've come across from the past couple months
The last few months have been pretty fun!
It’s been quite different from the start of the year. All I can really remember from the start of the year is that I was content spending pretty much all my time reading everything I could about purpose and spirituality. Now, my reading diet has drifted towards psychology and my energy is being directed towards watching Stranger Things and Psych, exhibiting degenerate behavior on my travels, and whacking balls around a golf course.
The one thing that’s been really frustrating is that I’ve found it really hard to get into any kind of rhythm. With all the general excitement and movement going on in my life, it’s been so difficult to find time and space to think take intentional action. My mind has felt so FUZZY; I feel like I’ve done a lot and read a lot, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve taken meaningful steps in any direction. I’ve just kind of hovered around.
Regardless, life has still been incredible and I’ve come across some fascinating thoughts and ideas that I’m really eager to share. I enjoyed making little lists of 5 earlier this year, so I chose that format again to share some of the things that have been swirling through my mind as of late.
5 quotes that blew my mind
I’m a certified fiend for a good quote. Here are 5 of them that I revisited over and over again:
1. Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
This is a quote by David Foster Wallace. Okay fine, it’s like a whole paragraph. But it is so wonderful in its entirety. DFW so elegantly combines several ideas that have been floating through my mind: that our society hasn’t lost its faith but is putting its faith in the wrong things, the vacuousness of materialism and consumption, and using myths as a medium to convey age-old wisdom.
2. Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
This is a quote by Rumi, a 13th-century poet and mystic. I think the beauty of these words speak for themselves; they’re a timeless reminder to never stop looking within.
3. For this same reason, I'm suspicious of those with strong, sharply delineated brands. Human beings are capricious and largely formless storms of idiosyncrasies, so a human only develops a clear and distinct identity through the artifice of performance…This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.
Not sure where I pulled this from tbh. But this concisely articulates a lot of my reservations around creating a ‘personal brand’ and also illuminates why so many creators burn out within a couple of years. Instead of finding freedom within the creator economy, they become chained to the whims of their audience, sometimes deluding themselves into thinking that capitulating to their audience to secure the most likes is an ‘authentic expression’ of themselves. It’s so sad. Is it even possible to find freedom and authenticity in the creator economy with dynamics like this? I don’t really know.
4. It gets dangerous when you admire a person for their good traits but start emulating their bad traits because you mistakenly believe that’s what made them great. That’s part of the saying, “Never meet your heroes.”
No clue where I got this either. But this is certified facts. This is a great example of the mental model called ‘the map is not the territory’ - we never have full context and understanding of every single variable in any system, so we’re incredibly prone to making inaccurate assessments as to why things happened the way they did. Maybe a startup blew up because they had found product-market fit and had implemented a unique and clever marketing engine, or maybe it blew up because their founder and some prominent investors really liked doing lines of coke together. Who knows.
5. When a flower blooms, the butterfly naturally finds it. When trees have blossomed, birds flock to the branches on their own, and when the leaves wither and fall, the birds scatter. Relationships with people aren’t so different.
:) so beautiful.
5 potential career paths I’m curious in
Maybe I’ll pursue these at some point. Maybe they’ll remain pipe dreams. 🤷♂️
1. Industrial Climate Technology
One of the pathways forward to mitigate climate change’s destructive impacts is through science and technology, and the parts that I’m most interested in are large-scale engineering projects such as highway redesigns, implementations of high-speed rail systems, etc. Outside of the technology itself, there are so many interesting things to consider. How do you navigate the complex legal landscape to execute fast and mitigate cost overruns? How do you balance the desire to move quick and innovate with the fact that fast action has typically resulted in the creation of more problems than it has solved? How do you align incentives with all stakeholders involved so that positive environmental impact is in everyone’s best interests? So fascinating!!
2. Urban City Design
I am a firm believer that the design and layout of cities plays a huge role in the collective energy, psyche, and lifestyle of its residents. I would love to learn more about how architecture styles, window styles, waterways, city centers, walkways, etc. affect our day to day lives. It’s frustrating that a lot of the bigger cities seem to have been designed mindlessly and haphazardly. One day I’ll design a city of my own.
3. Local Food Systems
I think the way to combat the general decline in nutritional quality is by building systems to promote local food production (which has the side effect of #savingthefarmers). Three specific projects that I think would be a lot of fun are:
Regenerative soil engineering - a huge part of of the decline in food quality has to do with the fact that we’ve destroyed the nutritional quality of the soil we grow food in. Outside of slow crop rotations and fertilizer, there has to be some way to more quickly regenerate soil quality. I’m going to figure it out.
Micro-gardens - how fun would it be if you got a little gardening kit to grow your own set of small herbs with weekly / monthly deliveries of everything you need to maintain that mini garden? How cool would it be if you could grow this mini garden on a small table or something? I think there’s a way to make it work.
Community gardens - would it work to have a centralized plot of land / soil where residents can lease little parts of it to grow their own gardens? It’d be trading off the convenience of having a garden right next to you (which isn’t a luxury everyone can afford based on where they’re living) with the benefit of having a separate organization take care of maintaining a perfect environment for the garden to thrive.
4. Performance Coach
I’ve been watching a ton of sports recently and am just so enamored by how these athletes perform at the highest level; how they keep their minds clear in the midst of so much chaos and pressure, and how they leverage the mental patterns they’ve built to employ lightning fast decision-making. It’s incredible how they operate, and I would love to work with other people on developing those mental heuristics as well as tackling fear and doubt so that it never has the opportunity to emerge when the stakes are high. My first client will be myself. 😤
5. Theologian
I’m really curious about what every single ‘religious’ text really says. I have a feeling that all of them essentially say the same things even if they have different stories and mythologies, and that the conflicts that stem between different religions have more to do with control and power than anything. Either way, I don’t think you can really understand someone else until you understand the stories and mythologies that form the basis of their worldview. It’ll be so much fun to learn!
5 books that I read
I’ll be completely honest - these are the only 5 books that I read since the last post, so I came very close to having to nix this section.
1. Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh
After reading this book, I started to understand a lot of people’s beef with wisdom-y books like this when they say that they’re way too high level. Either you are already well versed in some of the ideas present within the book in which case the material is self-evident, or you’re not familiar with the ideas and think the author is on shrooms. This is probably a really disrespectful thing to say to a renown monk who’s spent his whole life trying to help people find peace and happiness, but like look at this quote:
If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously.
I’m with you. I feel you. But even though these words are coming from a place of deep love, it probably falls on deaf ears for people who are in a lot of pain; it may even end up sounding dismissive. Gives me major 1970s Woodstock ‘make peace not war dudeeee’ vibes.
For me, this was a nice little refresher on some of the stuff that I’d read at the start of the year, but it didn’t really hit that deeply or push me intellectually at all. No real new ideas. If you’re interested in surfacing and transcending your fears, I think you’ll be better off doing an active process like guided meditation or journaling as opposed to a passive process like reading this. But to each their own.
2. Troubled Blood by Robert Galbriath
Robert Galbriath is an alias that JK Rowling uses. This was the 5th novel in a detective series she’s writing and it is set in London and centers around a British bloke by the name of Cormoran Strike. It was a really good book, but at the time I was reading it, I was just looking for a nice fun book that wouldn’t be too hard. But JK Rowling made me have to work to keep up, and I definitely wasn’t willing to think too deeply while reading. There were so many characters, I kept mixing them up and even forgot a few by the end and had to keep looking them up. The ending was an incredible twist ending; if I was really engaged in it, it probably would’ve hit me like a freight train. But I was barely focused while reading so it only hit me like a light push. Great read, but next time I’m looking for something fun and easy maybe I’ll stick with like Magic Tree House.
3. Bittersweet by Susan Cain
I LOVED THIS BOOK. Here’s a quote from the first chapter that summarizes what it’s about:
Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.
It’s about that subtle melancholy and longing feeling that always exists in the background of our existence. I’d never thought deeply about it, but Susan Cain inspired me to not run away from that feeling of emptiness. The stories told in this book are wonderful.
4. Wanting by Luke Burgis
Another INCREDIBLE read. It is a really insightful and easy-to-follow introduction into mimetic desire. Luke Burgis made a really good case that this is one of the driving factors behind a lot of the phenomenon that we see in modern society and I wholeheartedly agree.
Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models - people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.
5. The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
It has an interesting concept (that I won’t spoil if you’re interested in reading it), but I really didn’t like it and don’t think the structure of the book worked for me. The author barely spent any time humanizing the main characters (sure it’s kind of interesting that all these people have invested their whole lives into map-making but I can’t really relate to that). Also, I’m so sick of authors artificially inflating the stakes of literally everything. Like sure, maybe the logical implications of what’s going on mean that ‘the world is at stake’ but it makes me physically uncomfortable to keep reading and hearing that in everything I read and watch. This is the same reason I hated the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Like please. chill. out. I’m over it.
5 things I’ve changed my mind on
1. You can build a winning mentality
I used to think that winners were born; that some people were just born to be like Anthony Edwards or Harvey Specter and just have an inbuilt ability to come out on top and always had ice in their veins. Maybe some people were born that way, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be built. I think you can cultivate it by rigorously eliminating fear and any narratives of incapacity through a variety of different techniques.
For the longest time, I thought I was the definition of ‘good but not elite’, forever sentenced to come up just short. Fuck that. I will learn how to close.
2. Science is really sus
I used to pretty much believe every single thing that referenced a scientific study with the assumption that if it was published in a scientific journal it must check out. Then I started reading about the replication crisis in science (i.e. that most things that are published are impossible to reproduce) which seems…not right considering things hard science should follow set rules. Then I started reading some of the methods that some of these studies employed and it is so sketchy. It’s messy under the hood! And the one thing that people always forget about science is that eventually everything gets proven wrong. Well not everything, but you get the idea.
In any case, if someone’s best argument for doing something is ‘because a study said so!’, that’s probably a red flag. I’m trusting my gut.
3. Luxury is alienating
The other day I was traveling and I had an incredibly smooth experience. I walked into the ATL airport, used my CLEAR membership to skip the long line, hopped into the Delta Sky Lounge for a quick bite of food, and then strolled to the gate right as my flight was starting to board. It was seamless.
Except I felt so guilty. Here I was, a healthy, fit 23-year old using benefits from my parents’ credit card while there were all these other people - older people, people with young children, etc. - that could’ve used all the luxuries I had. I also just felt so disconnected and alienated from everyone - here I am looking elitist as shit when I know that I’m just a clueless kid who is in no way any better than anyone else. I didn’t like the feeling at all.
I think I’ll enjoy these luxuries for a couple of years but after a certain point I think I want to give them up. I never want to feel like I’m above these day to day discomforts that everyone has to experience.
4. There definitely is a such thing as failure
Honestly up till just a couple months ago I’d always be reassuring myself by saying that there’s no such thing as failure as long as I’m learning, that it’s not rejection but redirection, etc. No more.
Trying to feel good or positive all the time is a road to nowhere. Sometimes I have to accept that I simply fucked up and sit with the disappointment, frustration, and anger that arises. For example, spending more time playing beer pong than thinking about my future during my senior year of college was a colossal failure. It ended up working out, but that doesn’t justify the process. For me, part of learning how to close is going to be learning how to be radically honest with myself and not being afraid of feeling like shit, because sitting with those feelings is usually the precursor to tremendous periods of growth and inspired work.
5. You don’t have to choose between jack of all trades or master of one
People always yelled at me as I was growing up that I needed to specialize in one thing or pick one thing to go deep in because otherwise I’d be stuck being a jack of all trades when it’s really mastery that precedes success. This never really sat well with me; there were too many things I was interested in and I always feared committing to something that I wasn’t all in on.
I’m starting to realize that there’s a little hack within this supposed dichotomy. By becoming a master of learning / systems thinking, you can become a master at everything; with an ironclad process and a hunger to grow, I can supercharge my growth in every one of the myriad of things I’m interested in. Web dev, marketing, golf, tennis, cooking, whatever.
No more trying to pursue mastery in only one domain. Ace of all trades baby.
5 articles that hit different
1. A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - Russell Ackoff
This is a really dense article and I think I understood maybe 40% of it, but I resonated with the thesis of the article so deeply:
Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary. Systems thinking is holistic; it attempts to derive understanding of parts from the behavior and properties of wholes, rather than derive the behavior and properties of wholes from those of their parts.
That’s the kind of thinking that I want to develop.
2. Value Beyond Instrumentalization by Jasmine Wang
A really, really well-articulated argument about how we need to pull back from the drive to ‘build quickly and break things’:
This glorification of action over thought is reflected in Silicon Valley's culture and canonical texts. Books like Zero to One or essays like It's Time to Build emphasize the urgent need to create, innovate, hack, and iterate on products with vast social consequences, rather than the responsibility of technologists to pause, reflect, and introspect before doing so. To slow down is to end up default dead; the rhythm and pace of how technology is supposed to be built does not allow for consideration of social consequences. The pattern is repeated at an individual level: ethical thought and decision-making is believed to only be possible after one achieves financial freedom.
The rest of the article dives deep into the consequences of the ‘action over thought’ mindset. Well worth the read.
3. What Progress Wants by Paul Kingsnorth
Incredible criticism of the movement centered on science // technology // rationality. It starts off a little dense and has a lot of Biblical imagery sprinkled throughout, but I think the central argument is still really compelling, powerful, and scary.
The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards - where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people - they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.
What Progress wants is to replace us.
4. The Modern Diet is a Biosecurity Threat by David Oks
The central argument here is that nutrient density within the foods we eat has substantially declined as a result of the destruction of local food ecosystems. Instead, they’ve been replaced by each country / state specializing in specific cash crops. I now believe that your health is less about the specific diet you have and more about the quality of ingredients you consume. Eat local!
5. Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler
This is an amazing analysis for understanding how it’s possible for other people to hold insane beliefs that make no sense to us. And why it’s impossible for us to ever think of ourselves as crazy.
5 more banger articles
Read too many insane articles recently so had to throw 5 more in:
1. The Noonday Demon by Luke Burgis
This article is a must-read for anyone who feels like they can relate to the following phenomenon:
The peculiar malaise that social media has generated—which I propose is the root problem—is widespread acedia: a spiritual laziness and boredom characterized by non-stop, frenetic activity where nothing really ‘sticks’, and people begin to have a passive experience of their own lives…They float from one experience to another, one tweet to the next tweet, and experience them as disparate moments, unconnected from one another and lacking any solidity or embeddedness in which those experiences and relationships might bear some relation.
2. How People Think by Morgan Housel
This is a longer article but is so, so good. It’s way better than just a list of cognitive biases; the explanations of all the core ideas are so concise and clear.
But so many behaviors are universal across generations and geographies. Circumstances change, but people’s reactions don’t. Technologies evolve, but insecurities, blind spots, and gullibility rarely does.
This article describes 17 of what I think are the most common and influential aspects of how people think.
3. The Happiness Lottery by Rob Henderson
The author makes the case that sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is more important for people’s wellbeing than socioeconomic status. This blew my mind.
-Other research suggests that income doesn’t have a lasting increase on happiness because people usually adapt to money. In contrast, marriage, family, and health have lasting increases on happiness and are immune to hedonic adaptation.
-Compared with not attending any religious service, attending a religious service once a week has the same effect on happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution.
4. The Gentrification of Disability by Freddie DeBoer
This article centers on the damaging consequences of trying to ‘validate’ and ‘normalize’ mental illness:
But the challenge to them remains the same: how do you proceed with your quest to turn mental illness into a positive thing, an honored thing, a “valid” thing, without inevitably privileging the narratives and interests of those whose mental illness is least malign?
…
Because the way things are going, contemporary mental illness discourse threatens to do to the truly incapacitated the very thing it claims to oppose - leaving them voiceless, ignored, unheard, alone.
5. Every Bay Area House Party by Scott Alexander
This is just a hilarious read imagining the experience of attending a Silicon Valley house party.
“How did you get the money for this?”
“Same place every young would-be philosopher who’s overly confident in a crazy idea gets money . . . ”
You and Wind say it together: “ . . . Peter Thiel!”
Lmao.
5 tunes I’m playing on repeat
1. Potion by Calvin Harris
Song of the summer. No doubt about it.
2. Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush
Yes, I’m one of the people that got obsessed with this song after that one Stranger Things scene. No shame.
3. Moon by Jonah Kagen
I feel so at ease every time I listen to this song. The beat is so soothing and the lyrics are beautiful.
4. Kids by MGMT
I don’t know how I just discovered this song. There’s no better song to be playing while driving around at sunset with the top down. The vibes are just IMPECCABLE.
5. Mirrors by Justin Timberlake
I don’t know how I’m back into the Mirrors phase for the first time after high school but I’m not that upset about it.
I’m very curious what the next few months will look like.
I’m a little nervous. I’ll be traveling pretty much all of August and parts of September so I know this next month will be crucial to stop drifting and get moving; to snap out of this period of mental fuzziness that I find myself in. I sometimes get the impulse to blame my inability to focus and find peace on my environment, but that just means that I have to rise to the challenge of cultivating clarity and intention even in an environment that feels like its working against me.
Life just seems to be getting so busy and complicated and moving so fast. Sometimes I crave the simplicity I found in the dead of Minnesota winter where it was just me, my books, and my blanket for weeks at a time. Whenever I find myself thinking along those lines, I also feel the simultaneous urge to slap myself for complaining about the precious few days of Vitamin D we get up here.
I’m really excited for the near future though! I like the pieces that I’ve started to assemble, and even though I’m struggling to fit them all together right now, I know I’ll figure it out eventually. I’ve been thrown an interesting set of challenges to navigate, and I can’t to weave my way through them.
Love this!